Grandkids overnight, what are we going to do to entertain the little hoodlums? I was just getting ready to float the idea of an early get up and taking them fishing when they asked if we could go fishing. Cool and I was off the hook, when it comes to the grandkids grandma can’t say no. With a plan in place, boat hooked up and an early bedtime we hit the sack. 3:00 alarm for me and a 3:30 get up for our little guest fishermen we were rolling by 4:00. Had a hard time finding ice but eventually we were on the way up the hill to Lake Cavanaugh.

A quick no fuss launch, our pajama clad guests onboard and we were motoring up the lake by sun-up. With a fresh batch of kokanee Korn on hand we had planned to target kokanee and release most of the cutthroat we hooked. The “Plan” but apparently not the reality.

The reality was that it was tough fishing. All the kokanee we hooked were 8-11”, not the big fish we had encountered on a previous trip and cutthroat dominated the bite. That was the skipper’s point of view, our little guests were having a blast. To them a fish is a fish is a fish. In the end we had 8 kokanee and 8 cutts to about 16 or 17”. We hooked many other fish but even with a little GP assistance our early release ratio was pretty high.

We were relying on our usual kokanee game plan; small dodger, some sort of lure and corn. We had plain corn, tuna corn, garlic/tuna corn and “Carp Spit” corn onboard but the carp spit corn seemed to edge out the other corn flavors. Small spinner blades. A bead or 2 and one of my kokanee flies was the ticket Sunday. Even though there was a smoky overcast all morning chrome/UV dodgers ahead of some form of pink lure was the go-to setup.

With my iTroll in the hunt mode our trolling speed varied between .08 and 1.2 MPH. Although I was generally chasing meter marks, early on I ran the thermometer down and had noted that at 40’ the water was 52.6 degrees. All of the kokanee were hooked off of small schools of fish at 30-40’. Most of the cutthroat we caught off of individual meter marks at 28-60’. We played with leader length a bit and an 8-10” leader was the sweet spot.

We fished and munched until 10:30-11:00 then let the boys skipper the boat as we cruised the shoreline for a couple hours. Aside from the smoke it was a perfect grandkids day and they were sound asleep before we were on the main road and heading home.

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